


Phosphenes

by clear



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Angst, M/M, Medical use of painkillers, One-Sided Attraction
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-06
Updated: 2020-06-06
Packaged: 2021-03-03 20:14:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,662
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24571372
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/clear/pseuds/clear
Summary: I know you're not sorryWhy should you be?'Cause who am I to be in loveWhen your love never is for me?
Relationships: Kuroo Tetsurou/Yaku Morisuke
Comments: 11
Kudos: 83





	Phosphenes

Yaku’s living room is underwater.

As he sits on his couch in the darkness, he feels the churning depths begin to press down on him. They sit heavy on his chest, only getting heavier, and there’s a growing dimness in his ears as sound gives way to the hollow reverberations of deep silence. It’s the kind of quiet that envelops someone not when the surrounding world is empty and devoid of life, but is simply too full to allow anything else into the soundscape. It’s overwhelming, it’s stifling, it’s _calming_ all at once.

He tips his head back, takes a slow breath, and sees plankton bolting around his ceiling like frenetic stars in the night sky. They move in chaotic parabolas, dance around each other in lilting ellipses. He can only see these trajectories because they are illuminated by the beams of light that slice through the darkness of the deepwater submersible descending down, down, down into the depths beyond the drop-off on other side of the coffee table.

When he swallows, he shivers a little and feels the slow bob of his throat all the more intensely with how craned his neck is against the cushion and backrest behind him. A bitterness still lingers on the very back of his tongue, where the painkillers dissolved a little in the seconds before he could wash them down with water. But as they begin to take effect he loses this edge of displeasure to the pleasant, looping ease unraveling drowsily in the pit of his stomach. The stems of this euphoria grow back up inside him until they reach the base of his throat, flowers blooming under the bruised skin of his shoulders and soothing the throbbing, shooting pangs that surround the broken wing of one collarbone as it tries to knit itself back together.

Yaku rolls his eyes back to the television screen as the submersible catches the flickering body of a swordfish swimming through the gloom, its body a dagger slicing through the water when the spotlights hit it.

The aimless feeling of floating drains from his living room when there is an abrupt rapping on his front door.

His initial reaction is to redouble his focus on the documentary playing out on screen, which now shows a brilliant red squid that lives only in the blackness of the abyssal zone, according to the narrator. He scrunches his eyebrows a little in thought, idly wondering if the squid even _knows_ it is red with the eternal dark all around.

He doesn’t really know how much time has passed when the knock comes again. It’s even more insistent this time. He tries to remember if he ordered food, but then recalls the dirty dishes in his sink that disagree. He checks his phone, and grimaces a little when screen is suddenly too bright now that his eyes have adjusted to the dark. It’s a Tuesday at eight—there’s no reason for any neighbors or other tenants in his apartment complex to be knocking on doors they think are their own.

Sighing to himself, he stands on uncertain legs and hobbles to the door, frustration already brewing in a dark cloud that disrupts the dreamy peace starting to soften his head and the dull ache in his shoulder and ankle. The fluorescent light from the complex hallway assaults him, and he must make a disgruntled noise in the back of his throat before he realizes it because the person in front of him on his doormat is _laughing_.

The warm chuckle that sounds two steps away from a purr is as unmistakable as the wild, inky bedhead that Yaku has to tilt his head up to see. He knits his brows a little, thoughts already coming a bit more sluggishly, and he asks, “What are you doing here?”

“Checking up on you,” Kuroo replies like it’s obvious. There’s a plastic bag printed with a convenience store logo in one of his hands, and he lifts it a little as if it underscores his point. “Are you gonna let me in?”

“Do I have a choice?”

A grin splits Kuroo’s lips like the slow, saccharine drip of honey spilled down the side of a tea mug. “No,” he answers in a voice that’s just as pleasant.

Yaku swallows when he realizes his throat’s gone a little dry, and steps to the side to let the other in. The meds he’s been on usually _do_ make him thirsty, he reasons, though another part of him is a little angry at how easily Kuroo saunters in, at how _he himself_ lets the other in without much of a fight.

“It’s so _dark_ in here,” the other complains as he toes off his shoes at the door and makes his way further in. “It’s not even time for bed yet.”

“Easy for _you_ to say,” Yaku retorts as he locks the front door again and shuffles back to the couch. He levers himself down with a grunt, and ignores the twinge in his ankle at the effort of bearing weight on its own.

Kuroo has apparently decided to make himself busy in the little kitchen behind him because he’s already rounded the corner of the breakfast bar and flicked on the light over the stove, considerate enough for Yaku to keep the overhead ones off. It throws a dim yellow pallor into the living room, contrasting with the cool blackened blue still shining from where Yaku’s deep-sea documentary sits paused on the television screen.

“Did you already take your painkillers tonight?” Kuroo throws over his shoulder, and part of Yaku wants to turn and _look_ when he hears the clatter of cabinets being open and shut, the whisper of the tap being turned on, the gentle hum of the microwave; but his resolve to do much of anything except lie on the couch is quickly slipping away.

“Yeah,” he answers, probably a little belatedly.

“You forgot I was stopping by tonight, didn’t you?”

Yaku shrugs noncommittally, realizes Kuroo probably doesn’t see it, but doesn’t offer another response. If he thinks hard enough he can remember a short exchange on Sunday night, though it had been quickly subsumed in his mind by his post-emergency room routine of _sleep, painkillers, scroll for something on the television, fall back asleep,_ rinse and repeat for four days now.

He has also frankly lost count of who has actually stopped by, and who has made promises to. He knows Kai has been one—he was the one that originally saw him home from the hospital at three on Friday morning along with his dad, unwaveringly loyal best friend that he was; and made good on a vow to call and check up on him late the next day after he undertook the responsibility of spreading the information to their coach, teammates, and wider circle of friends at college. Yaku had spent most of the day asleep, so when he woke up in the evening his phone was nearly dead with all of the texts and calls he’d received.

(A dozen of them, two calls, and a voicemail were from Kuroo, and Yaku still hasn’t drummed up the courage to make the single remaining notification lingering in his voice mailbox disappear. Somehow—even though they’ve known each other for years now—that feels a bridge too far, a little too risky. Perhaps, in times of crisis, Kuroo could be just like the red squid in the ocean’s midnight zone—alone and unaware of himself in the vulnerability of unknown darkness, but nonetheless still a predator to things smaller and more delicate than him.)

His parents had been dropping by, of course—he’d spent the first two nights at home, before he reminded them gently of the fact that he _still had a term to finish_ , no matter how unfortunate or impossible it really seemed, and compromised his return to his campus apartment with the promise that they could visit whenever and he would check in regularly to ensure everything was fine. His mother had been by earlier, busying herself with cleaning his small apartment top-to-bottom and taking his dirty laundry, promising to return it when she came to check on him again. The past handful of days had felt like a week already, and even recounting so much in his own head began to make Yaku’s eyes heavy with the effort.

His eyes slip closed and time must pass without him noticing because when he opens them again, Kuroo is peering down at him expectantly from where he stands in front of his seat on the couch and there is steam curling into his nose from something held just below it.

“Here,” he says, in his Captain voice that leaves little room for argument. Yaku’s a little taken aback by it—it’s a voice he only knows accompanied by waxed gym floors and the smell of sweat and vulcanized rubber, not here in the soft darkness of his own home. His eyes dip down and he sees a bowl of broth, noodles, and vegetables, and a glance down to the end table on his left reveals a mug of tea steaming gently on top of a coaster.

“I already ate,” Yaku attempts, but his voice comes out soft and petulant-sounding. He tries to glare at the smile that tugs at the corner of Kuroo’s mouth because of it, but he probably looks like he’s pouting from the way Kuroo purses his lips harder to remain somewhat serious.

“When?” he throws back in a challenge after schooling himself again.

Yaku reaches the hand that’s not in a sling up to run it through his hair. “At four,” he replies after a moment of thought. Or maybe it was three. Or two. He can’t remember when his mother had made lunch for them.

This definitely doesn’t satisfy Kuroo. “You need to eat again,” he insists firmly and inches the bowl a little closer to his face to emphasize his point.

“I’m not hungry.”

“You should have eaten something with your medicine. You’ll get sick otherwise.”

Yaku tilts his head up and holds Kuroo’s shrewd gaze for another beat, but then finally relents with an irritated huff and takes the bowl into his free hand. But the other still stands, _looms_ over him with his arms crossed over his chest, an eyebrow raised impatiently. Yaku thinks if anything, _he_ is the one acting childish here, even as his brain indulgently contemplates sticking out his good foot and hitting the side of one knee just to watch Kuroo crumple.

A wordless conversation passes between them—the dark eyebrow lifting _again_ , hazel-gold eyes dragging significantly from the bowl clutched in a new hand back up to brown eyes that roll in response. Yaku raises the vessel to his lips, takes an experimental sip of some of the broth, and this seems to be the thing that _enchants_ Kuroo into moving again, because he nods in approval and heads back to the kitchen with a satisfied set to his shoulders.

Yaku manages about three more sips of broth, a mouthful of vegetables, and none of the noodles before it joins the mug of tea on the coffee table. There’s little hope of him eating right now with the way his stomach has twisted in on itself and the growing dimness in his body.

Complete darkness envelops the room again when Kuroo turns off the light in the kitchen and shuffles over to the couch with his own bowl of instant noodles. He takes a moment to set the dish on the coffee table and pull a Pocari bottle from where it was stashed in the front pocket of his hoodie. Yaku watches from the corner of his eye as he makes himself comfortable on the other side of the couch, broad shoulders tucking in and long limbs spreading out in a scene that’s both mismatched and completely natural, chaotic and comfortable.

Three feet of space sits between them, personified in a single small couch cushion. It’s as innocuous as an underwater trench viewed from a boat deck on the surface—no different from the expanse of vast blue surrounding it on all sides, but still hiding something impossibly deep and impassibly wide underneath. Only acknowledged at the surface by those who already know it’s there.

“What are you watching?” Kuroo finally asks as he reaches for his bowl from the coffee table, and Yaku fumbles underneath himself to find the lost remote. The other’s eyes flash over to him instantly when he accidentally twists a little too far, and feels a sharp twinge in his shoulder that makes him suck in a steadying breath. He looks like a cat drawn up and ready to pounce, but he’s waiting to see how Yaku handles it.

He presses on and ignores the pain, snuffing it with the same tight lid he places on the part of himself that tried to run away with Kuroo’s instinctual concern and hoard it.

“‘S about the deep ocean,” Yaku answers as he finally finds the remote wedged between the cushions and presses play. He props his foot in a boot back up on the pillow sitting on the edge of the coffee table that’s been scooted closer to him, and curls into himself a little bit.

“Interesting,” Kuroo says, and sounds like he means it as the dim glimmer of a school of fish in the twilight zone illuminates his face. His attention is rapt on the screen as a pod of aggressive squid are introduced as predators, pausing only to take in another mouthful of food.

Yaku isn’t entirely sure how long it’s been since Kuroo’s arrived, maybe a half hour at most, but he already looks like he belongs. He turns his attention back to the documentary and tries not to think about the way Kuroo’s intruded on his routine, his relaxation, his thoughts, but has carefully reset everything back the way it was once he’s carved out his own space like it’s nothing at all. It’s not the first time this has happened, and the part of Yaku’s brain that doesn’t usually speak, but roars loud and heavy in his ears, especially _now_ when medicine softens his pain but still makes him feel _entirely too much_ , whispers that he hopes it’s not the last time.

They continue watching in easy silence—somewhere along the way Yaku has propped his good left arm up on the rest beside him and pillowed his head against it, and feels his eyelids grow heavier. The narrator sounds further and further away and he slowly slips under the currents again, where everything is hazy and muffled and the world becomes suggestions of shapes in the twilight of his vision.

There’s a moment where the submersible on screen shuts off its observation spotlights, plunging the screen and the two watching into total darkness. A beat passes. Then suddenly, gorgeously, light explodes over the screen in sparkling patterns, winking like stars in the limitless expanse of the black sea in the sky.

“Those jellyfish lighting up,” Kuroo supplies, in a voice so fond and awed that it curls something in Yaku’s stomach. “Kou and I saw that when we went to the aquarium last summer. It was crazy—we’d never seen anything like it before.”

The submersible recording this dazzling light show is surrounded by an acrylic sphere, four inches thick to protect against the crushing pressure of the water above and all around them. Yaku, on the other side of the couch and just as deep, has no such shield around himself when the heaviness of fifty jet planes—according to the narrator’s earlier metaphor—crashes down on his chest.

Yaku isn’t sure how much time passes after Kuroo speaks, but it feels like an eternity as his lungs, shriveled to a fraction of their size behind his ribs, try to remember how to breathe.

“How is he?” he finally manages in a tone that sounds impressively neutral. “How’s his semester going? They still look like they’re playing good from the current standings.”

“He’s great,” Kuroo answers, and against Yaku’s better judgment, he turns his head enough to see the soft smile on his face that’s glowing from more than just the bioluminescence on-screen. “He thinks his exams went well. Since their term lets out a week earlier, he _finally_ managed to clean the damn apartment. It’s a miracle I can see the bedroom floor again.”

Pain, he knows from common sense and snippets from introductory physiology lectures, is a tool of self-preservation. Pain chides him for pressing past his limits in practice, suffuses his body in a punishing castigation the next day for diving onto the court too many times. Pain stabbed through his collarbone and ankle last Friday night once he’d tripped down the icy library stairs, screaming _Something is wrong and something is broken_ in a ceaseless mantra all the way to the hospital. The medicine he’s prescribed, the medicine he’s taken tonight, smothers that pain into something bearable, turns him sleepy and agreeable.

But it also turns him so very _vulnerable_.

Maybe the medicine has dulled his _other_ instincts of self-preservation, because now his heart is trying to spill out from between his ribs with no regard for danger. His mind is soft and indulgent and running away with the idea that perhaps the tender look in Kuroo’s eyes and on his face could be meant for _him_ , and not the person he’s already spent the past couple of years with. And that perhaps watching a documentary about the ocean on a Tuesday night in ratty sweatpants with instant noodles gone cold could _ever_ compare to being led around a real-life aquatic light show by the person who _actually_ makes him smile like that, who could fill Kuroo’s face and chest with enough warmth to keep alive in the coldest water at the very bottom of the sea.

“I’m glad,” Yaku says as he turns back to the screen. His mind grows wilder now, unbidden and perhaps more hallucinatory than before because he imagines himself ensnared in strong tentacles, suckers sticking to his skin and pulling every which way in a pain that is new but so achingly familiar. Despite the fact that his body remembers what’s hurt it and how, it hasn’t figured out what to do to make it stop, to run away at the first signs of danger.

Kuroo stretches a little, tucks his feet up underneath himself, and encroaches on the space between them. He doesn’t seem to notice, bobbing easily at the surface, but it’s all Yaku can think about _down here_ , surrounded on all sides, water filling every part of him and drowning out any soft sense of ease and agreeability. Suddenly he feels like an urchin, nothing but sharp spines protecting a soft core dwelling at the very bottom of the ocean. Waiting in the immense pressure for _something_ to drift all the way down here and sustain him, a tiny morsel of something old and long-dead that might fill him with life again.

On screen, it’s _resourceful_. It’s called _amazing_ , because his adaptations mean he’s surviving against the seemingly-indomitable odds. Here, on the couch, it’s _pitiful_. It’s called _stupid_ , because his only genetic mutations are a talent for deception that rivals the translucent-bodied creatures of the deep, and a heart that _persists_ , that doesn’t give up even when the game was lost a long time ago.

“He also hopes you’re doing well, of course. Told me to tell you to get better as soon as possible so you can dig his spikes again.” They both pause to laugh—something light and fond for Kuroo, and Yaku manages a snort that rattles his ribs. “And that he’s sorry he couldn’t stop by, but he will next time.”

He opens his mouth to lie again, and it’s no real surprise how easy it is now. He’s had years of practice, so his _“Sure, I’d like that”_ rolls off his tongue like the gentle kiss of a wave to the shore.

Yaku finds himself quietly rescinding his earlier thoughts about Kuroo’s intrusions. Now he kind of hopes that maybe this _is_ the last time.

One flash across the television leaves behind a cloud of glowing ink, curling quick and fast in the water before dispersing. Even though the narrator describes it as the unique bioluminescent escape tactic of a shrimp under attack, Yaku knows he’s seen it before.

He remembers the familiar flash from three years ago, accompanied by the wet drag of fingers across closed eyelids and the echo of _“He said yes, we’re going out this weekend”_ from his phone’s receiver straight to his chest. Painterly sparks of green and blue flashing through the darkness as he’d curled in on himself, pressed his knuckles to his eyes knowing they were nothing but wave breakers against a tsunami.

“We missed you at practice today,” Kuroo offers up into the silence that’s settled between them, that’s different than the comfortable quiet of before now that Kuroo’s unlatched something without even realizing it. Once again, the way Yaku’s head is swirling and churning in on itself makes him certain he’s missing some time. The documentary has moved onto something different, something ethereal and eternal called a _siphonophore_ that looks like icicles hanging motionless in the abyss. From where he’s curled into the corner of his couch looking up at the TV stand, it reminds him of a chandelier as it’s suspended in the dark ambiguity of the living room.

Kuroo’s words kick up the silt that’s settled at the bottom of his heart, muddied fingers digging down until they’ve gripped something he shouldn’t touch and twisted it, but now there’s only numbness. Here, when Yaku’s eyes are drooping and he’s finally dazed enough to not feel the pain in his body, the indulgent part of his mind can imagine Kuroo said something like _“_ I _missed you at practice,”_ and the other part of himself in charge of self-preservation, using pain to flag things he _shouldn’t be doing_ is nowhere to be found.

Yaku manages a noise of assent that must sound unconvincing, because the next thing he feels is fingers ruffling his hair and the rasp of spiker’s calluses against his scalp; and the thrill that fills his body uninhibited is like the airy weightlessness at the very top of a roller coaster before the biggest drop.

“Hey,” comes a voice that’s a lot closer than it was a few minutes (or maybe an _hour_ ) earlier, curling at the edges in amusement. “You didn’t fall asleep on me, did you?”

This would be the part where Yaku huffs and bats his hand away, if a version of his heart that should know better were in control of his actions. Instead, with that part of him sedated like _almost_ the rest of him, he turns his head a little into the touch.

 _“Mo-ri-suke,”_ Kuroo tries again, his voice a sing-song on each syllable that suggests he might be enjoying this a bit too much. He prods at Yaku’s rounded forehead with the pad of a finger, taps the upturned point of his nose a moment later. “Are you really going to make me carry you to bed?”

There’s a blanket tossed over the back of the couch. Yaku has used it for snatches of sleep over the past couple of days when hobbling to his bedroom felt like too monumental of a task even for someone as naturally stubborn as him. It’s a light grey made of soft, chunky knit that Kuroo _couldn’t_ have missed, even in the low light.

Kuroo chooses _him_ instead of it.

He lifts him like he weighs nothing at all, carefully arranging him in his arms so Yaku’s head is tucked into the crook of his neck like there’s nowhere else it would rather be. His hold is so strong and yet so careful that it makes the parts of Yaku that aren’t already broken want to shake apart, even on this night where he feels featherlight and made of string that’s slowly unraveling in the empty slots between the other’s fingers.

His mind is working too hard and not at all until his consciousness is marked only by sensations: The steady sound of a heartbeat he recognizes as _not his_ because of how _slow_ it is, how steady, and how _unlike_ the pace in his own chest that beats double time and skips entire bars all at once. The scent of mild soap and crisp deodorant, left behind after conquering a day’s hard-won sweat and grime. Camphor and menthol lingering on a stretched shirt collar. The warmth that seeps into the side of his body pressed against a broad chest. A sigh he hears and feels all around him, suspended in the single pool of calm at the center of a riptide that sets off none of the warning bells it should.

All of these coalesce into a trail of dreamy, curling thought in his head that sounds a lot like _Tetsurou, Tetsurou, T—_

_“‘Surou.”_

Yaku opens his eyes and feels the world swirl around him as his lips are still half-formed on the name. He’s breathless in the dark for a moment, like he’s _finally_ broken the surface except that it’s happened too quickly and there is nitrogen sizzling dangerously in his blood. His room is pitch black and once he feels his limbs rejoin his body he gropes blindly with his good arm towards the pulsating blue dot swimming nightstand-height on his left. A bleary swipe of his thumb across the keyboard shows that it’s three in the morning, and he has a handful of missed texts.

_10:36 PM_

_From: Kuroo Tetsurou_

_just wanted to let u know i made it home_

_thanks for letting me stop by_

_even if u fell asleep barely an hr in!!!_

_will have to finish the doc next time_

The sixth message to come in is a picture. It’s warm, illuminated in lamplight coming in from just out of frame, and shows the perfectly-curled body of a grey tabby cat staring up into the camera with wide golden eyes.

_she says goodnight too_

In any other case, Yaku would smile. Cats have always been his soft spot, of course, and Kuroo’s is no exception—she’s talkative and cuddly in all the right ways, and makes him feel just a little more grateful for the simple things in life.

But he sees that she’s curled into the space on a bed created by two bodies lying alongside one another, and the hazy euphoria evaporates from Yaku’s body. It leaves him with a dry mouth and an acute awareness of the hollowed-out space that’s grown past the need for his body, and instead has grown so large it envelops the entire empty apartment around him.

He spends another two heartbeats with his head above the water as his body catches up with his mind, with his heart, remembers how it’s been hurt, how it _should_ hurt beyond broken collarbones and sprained ankles, how it _does_ hurt because of 8:00 PM Tuesday kindnesses offered without a second thought to their subtext and accepted with too much one-sided secret indulgence.

The roller coaster finally drops, and he is plunged down, down, _down_ into the depths he is so familiar with, where the weight on his shoulders keeps him pressed down and _grounded_. Where he remembers why he should have taken over-the-counter relievers, because the lack of pain is dangerous, because the artificial elation leaves him far too buoyant, far too hopeful when something that is not his, would never _be_ his is involved.

Where he closes his eyes and _feels_ saltwater on his face, and watches phosphorescent clouds of ink bloom behind his lids as he presses the heel of his hand to them to stave off the tears.

**Author's Note:**

> keepin it short ~~and sweet~~ this time!!!
> 
> Lyrics in the beginning taken from [8](https://youtu.be/OZYd9JxithE).
> 
> Thank you SO MUCH as usual for reading! ♡ It’s truly mind-boggling to me that you all spend your precious time reading what I write, but I’m so so honored and so so grateful that you DO! We are now In This Thing together, congratulations!!!
> 
> i have taken out my invisalign and this is my [twitter](https://twitter.com/cherielimeade)


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